Strategy board games are a popular genre of board games. The classic strategy board game is chess, but the genre also includes Checkers and Go, for example.
An abstract strategy game is a strategy game aiming to minimize luck without a theme. Some strategy games, however, will have a theme such as territorial conquest. In the strictest sense abstract strategy games conform to the definition of a board or card game in which there is no hidden information, no non-deterministic elements (such as shuffled cards or dice rolls), in which (usually) two players or teams take a finite number of alternating turns. The most enduring of humanity's classic board games, including Checkers, Chess, Go, and Mancala, fit into this category.
Strategic play is sometimes said to resemble a series of puzzles the players pose to each other. At least one commentator has noted the relationship between puzzles and abstract strategy board games in that each board state presents the player with a puzzle to solve: what is the best move? Every such board state/puzzle could, theoretically, be solved using only logic. Accordingly, a strategy game can be thought of as a sequence of puzzles that can each be solved logically. Game play consists of each player posing such a puzzle to the other, iteratively. Good players are the ones who find the most difficult puzzles to present to their opponents.
For purists, an abstract strategy game cannot have random elements or hidden information. In practice, however, many games that do not strictly meet these criteria are commonly classified as abstract strategy games. Games such as Continuo, Octiles, Can't Stop, Sequence, and Mentalis could be considered abstract strategy games, despite having an element of luck or bluffing. A smaller category of non-perfect abstract strategy games manages to incorporate hidden information without using any random elements. The best known example here is Stratego.
It is not unusual for an abstract strategy game to have multiple starting positions. In these types of games, some way to choose which player goes first, such as flipping a coin, for example, may be the only element of chance in the game. That is, the election of which player goes first is determined outside of the game itself. Nevertheless, most people agree that although one of them is starting each game from a different position, the game itself still has no luck element.